E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pitying the hearts of men The BSO’s dark Debussy; Boston Baroque’s lightweight Handel BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

"The drama of Pelléas," Claude Debussy wrote of Pelléas et Mélisande, his only completed opera, "despite its dream-like atmosphere, contains far more humanity than so-called ‘documentaries of life.’ " That quality of humanity — of indefinable feelings ("I am happy, but I am sad"), of infinite "pity for the hearts of men," of "the sadness of all one sees" — was abundantly evident at the two extraordinary Boston Symphony Orchestra concert performances of Debussy’s masterpiece last weekend — the BSO’s very first.

The composer read Maurice Maeterlinck’s hypnotic play in 1892, shortly after it was published, saw it on stage a few months later, and almost immediately asked for permission to turn it into an opera. Although he completed it in two years, it didn’t get produced for another seven. And no wonder. Pelléas et Mélisande is like a weird cross between Tristan und Isolde and Hänsel und Gretel (Pelléas falls in love with the young wife of his older half-brother, the prince Golaud, who has found Mélisande weeping by a spring after he has lost his way in a forest). It’s like something out of Dante and Samuel Beckett by way of Freud: a psychological mystery of intense passion and ineffable innocence, an existential love triangle in which the lovers are more like brother and sister. Debussy left the play almost unchanged, and probably no extended text has ever been more sympathetically set to music.

Pelléas has never been out of the regular repertoire of major international opera houses, but it’s been years since there’s been a performance in Boston (nearly three and a half decades ago, at the Loeb Drama Center, Gunther Schuller conducted the New England Conservatory Orchestra and two casts, including soprano Susan Larson as a memorable Mélisande, singing two different versions — one in English, one in French). In the days of Mary Garden, the first Mélisande, it was big box office. Art and sex were a powerful draw. Yet Thursday night at Symphony Hall, during a pause just before the big love scene, when Mélisande, like Rapunzel, lets her long hair fall from her tower window, crowds of people made an early exodus — maybe hoping to catch the end of the seventh and last Red Sox/Yankees playoff game.

They missed one of the most sublime moments I can remember at the BSO. Mélisande was mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whom I’d go out on the nearest limb to call the greatest living opera singer. She’s been especially admired for portraying characters of single-minded decisiveness: Bizet’s Carmen, Berlioz’s Dido and Beatrice, Mozart’s Donna Elvira, Handel’s militant Sesto (in Giulio Cesare) and spiritual Irene (in Theodora), Charpentier’s Medea, Myrtle Wilson in John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (a role created for her). Mélisande is decisive in odder ways — more re-active than active. She seems directionless, yet she’s unswerving — aggressive in her passivity. When Golaud offers to retrieve her gold crown from the spring, she tells him she’d rather die than have it back — and never explains. Golaud, Michael Steinberg writes in his probing program note, "lives in a world in which two and two must add up to four; Mélisande sees no necessity for such a notion."

Lieberson was living this role even before she began to sing, being silently startled by Golaud when he finds her in tears. And when she sang, her plush, creamy, rich-textured yet gossamer voice was both voluptuous and vulnerable, as ideal an embodiment of this music as the music itself is of the play.

In the Tower Scene, Debussy finally allows Mélisande to sing out: first in the exquisite and touching little folk song that ends with a strange, hauntingly unaccompanied prayer ("Saint Daniel and Saint Michael,/Saint Michael and Saint Raphael./I was born on a Sunday, a Sunday at noon . . . ") and then in the love duet, when she lets her hair down to Pelléas, who’s waiting at the foot of the tower, dazed and utterly ravished. This is the first of the few great emotional outpourings in this reticent opera. And both Lieberson and the elegant British baritone Simon Keenlyside rose to it. In their even more ecstatic later duet, their alternating voices throbbed and entwined in forbidden passion.

Lieberson can make even a simple phrase uncanny. Mélisande’s chillingly muted response to Pélleas’s admission that he has to leave because he loves her, "I love you, too," resonated with all its tragic implications. You could hear the voice that Pelleas says "comes from the ends of the earth"; you could also hear that it was coming from Mélisande’s innermost depths. Lieberson’s willful Carmen, her regal and loving Dido, and now her almost disembodied Mélisande are among the most fulfilled operatic characterizations of our time. (She’ll return to Jordan Hall for a FleetBoston Celebrity Series concert with Peter Serkin on December 7.)

If no one else in the cast approached her level, they were no slouches either — especially handsome, impassioned Keenlyside as the tender-hearted hero and black-voiced Canadian baritone Gerald Finley as the tormented Golaud. I could feel his pain and humiliation as he forces his son Yniold to spy on the apparently unconsummating lovers. Yniold was sung not by a short soubrette in drag but by eloquent 12-year-old boy soprano James Danner, who, having performed this part with both James Levine at the Met and Pierre Boulez with the Cleveland Orchestra, has (with the exception of Keenlyside) probably had more experience singing in this opera than anyone else in the cast. Warm-toned French contralto Nathalie Stutzmann played Geneviève, mother of both Pelléas and Golaud, as both unyielding and immobile in her helplessness. Versatile British bass-baritone John Tomlinson was an imposing Arkel, giving the profound pronouncements of the old grandfather king an unusual vocal weight. Alfred Walker, a disappointing Figaro with the Boston Lyric Opera in 1999, expertly fleshed out a couple of smaller roles here.

The orchestra, starting with John Ferillo’s poignant oboe, glowed. From Charles Schlueter’s muted trumpet to Timothy Genis’s ominous drum taps, there wasn’t a stumble. This was one of the BSO’s shining reincarnations as an object lesson in playing French music.

The force behind this performance was Bernard Haitink, who is stepping down after his ninth year as the BSO’s principal guest conductor. He’s been wanting to do a Pelléas here for years, and he finally got his wish, not to mention a dream cast. The week before, he gave the orchestra a dry run with a program of Wagner, Debussy, and César Franck, who, born in Belgium, was perhaps the most German of 19th-century French composers.

It wasn’t a very satisfying concert. The two Wagner pieces, the act-one Prelude to Parsifal and the Prelude and Liebestod ("Love-Death") from Tristan, were both square and flaccid. The Tristan Prelude, one of music’s most powerful expressions of erotic longing, felt as if it were about someone dimly trying to remember what it once felt like to have an erection. This Wagner sounded as watery as Debussy.

Haitink’s major liability as a conductor is that there’s almost no elasticity in his phrasing; he gives every note the same weight, so musical phrases remain static, with no forward impetus. Wagner’s phrases, especially in Tristan, always lean into what follows; Haitink gave us perpendicular. Debussy’s two "symphonic fragments" from Gabriele d’Annunzio’s mystery play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, his last piece for full orchestra, had a similar absence of eventfulness or direction. In Franck’s Symphonic Variations, Emanuel Ax was a livelier-than-usual soloist, but the performance was still short on character or charm. The program ended with a sweeping rendition of La mer, which served as an excellent rehearsal for Pelléas.

In the opera, Haitink caught not only the ebb and flow of Debussy’s symbolist tide pools of feeling but also his conversational inflections. Not every moment was equally captivating. Some people may have left because here and there the music dragged. Sometimes it was too loud for some of the singers. But Haitink’s conception was dramatic, and for once he conveyed a continuous sense of event, of suspense, and of heartbreak.

IT ISN’T FAIR to Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque that their concert version of Handel’s Alcina, apparently in its first Boston performances, should have opened the night after this thrilling Pelléas. Neither is it fair that my only previous Alcina — staged by Robert Carsen for the Paris Opera and imported by the Chicago Lyric Opera, with Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, and Jennifer Larmore — was one of the most inspired theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. (The original cast recording, led by William Christie, is on an Erato CD.) It’s hard to keep comparisons from being invidious.

Derived from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Alcina is the story of a latter-day Circe, an enchantress who transforms men into beasts. Handel’s humane twist is that the sorceress falls in love with one of her victims, the knight Ruggiero, whose fiancée, Bradamante, disguised as a man, follows him to Alcina’s bower of bliss. There she meets Morgana, Alcina’s sister, who falls in love with her at first sight, thinking she’s a man (in Pearlman’s version, both Ruggiero and Bradamante were sung by women). At the end, because Alcina can’t stop loving Ruggiero, she loses her magic powers and is destroyed.

The 19th century, with its insistence on realism, couldn’t handle Handel’s plots about magic and sorcery. But post-Freudians find in these implausible stories, as in mythology itself, profound patterns of all-too-human behavior. Some of Handel’s most poignant music comes when Alcina realizes her powers are gone. It’s clear he identified less with the virtuous lovers than with the defeated sorceress.

Pearlman got off to a slow clippity-clop Friday night, but by the second act he and his classy orchestra had begun to gather steam. The best singers were rainbow-toned mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore as an irritatingly smug, incessantly grinning Ruggiero (Robert Carsen revealed how even at the end Ruggiero still feels Alcina’s pull), New York City Opera coloratura Lauren Skuce as an oversexed Morgana with impressive vocal chops and a sense of humor, and young soprano Amanda Forsythe as a boy searching for his bewitched father. It’s always a treat to hear baritone Stephen Salters, but he needs a director who can control his tendency to ham it up.

Soprano Twyla Robinson was a rather monochromatic Alcina — three hours of her pretty chirping grew wearying with its unvaried tone and volume level. Renée Fleming showed the Chicago audience Alcina’s terror when her forces refuse to obey her commands; Robinson just went into a snit, slamming her magic wand to the floor. Jennifer Griesbach’s klutzy, unmusical, sit-com-ish "semi-staging" helped neither the music nor the performers. Still, even if the performance lacked so much of Handel’s urgency, mystery, and humanity, the audience was right to be delighted by its exposure to this enchanting work.